Never heard of that one, but I do know that when the site of a medieval silversmith's workshop is inspected by archaologists, a pile of platinum pebbles is often found in the corner. Platinum and silver look the same, have similar densities, and often run in the same ore bodies, but the temperatures attainable in a medieval furnace are insufficient to melt platinum. So, apparently the smiths poured off the molten silver, then (no doubt with a snort of disgust) tossed the useless platinum into the corner.
Alas, I don't recall; it might have been in one of the essays in Report on Planet Three. I read it decades ago, so I doubt I still have the book, but I'll check my library and post another reply here if it turns up -- and if some other kind soul hasn't beaten me to it.
As usual, Arthur C. Clarke thought of this long ago. I still remember his excerpt from the instructions: "Okay, kiddies, now that you've mixed your uranium hexafluoride..."
Not really. If anything, I think he goes out of his way to be optimistic about our chances; see the last chapter in particular. I believe this was a very calculated move on his part, as to portray our odds the way they really look would create hopelessness and paralysis. If we *do* have a chance, then it's essential for us to feel like we have one, and thus act to make it happen.
There's a great silent theater on Fairfax in L.A. (I think it's still around, though I haven't paid attention for a few years) that shows old films, complete with live piano accompaniment.
It's still there, but struggling. The accompaniments aren't always just piano; a couple of years ago I saw a live performance there of an original rock orchestration for Metropolis that was friggin' amazing.
The venue is also notable for being the site (about 10 years ago, IIRC) of a murder worthy of a second-rate detective movie; an associate of the original owner killed him in order to get control of his film collection -- in the box office during a showing!
Or rather, normally in the solid phase. "Water" is specific to H2O; "ice" is used generically for the solid phase of a variety of chemicals we (Terrans) are used to encountering as liquids or gasses.
I once read a science fiction story featuring beings from a Titan-like planet discussing Earth. One of them marveled that Earth was so unimaginably hot that its surface was mostly covered with deep pools of molten water. I thought that was beautifully phrased.
Space weapons are weapons specifically designed to attack objects in space or objects on the ground.
Well, let's see, does that mean my BB gun is a space weapon? It's pretty good at attacking objects on the ground. Yee haw, I'm a space-based weapon superpower!
Pretty much true. Look at some of the analyses done on the scientific value of the space station. Other than as a place to examine the effects of long-term living in space, it's pretty much useless. And even at that task it's suboptimal.
Their most difficult task before leaving the station was the maneuvering of a huge cargo container filled with 2 1/2 years worth of trash into the shuttle's payload bay.
When, at the age of seven, I sat enthralled by the Apollo XI landing in 1969, I would never have believed that our most sophisticated space vehicle in 2005 would be an aging garbage truck traveling a couple of hundred miles from Earth to visit a space station with no purpose.
I can't even think about this for too long; I start shaking with the force of my anger and disappointment.
We recently ported an app back end from EJB 2.1 to Spring plus Hibernate. I am incredibly impressed by the latter; this is the simple, efficient, well-architected ORM system Java has lacked for years. I'm still absorbing the beauty and power of inversion of control. And we haven't even begun to (directly) make use of Spring's AOP features.
I was beginning to have doubts about Java as a biz-dev language/platform. But Spring and Hibernate have made me a happy Java advocate again.
You should give props to the brilliant Weird Al Yankovic, who wrote and performed this masterpiece. (Which is now going through my head on permanent loop, thanks a ton.)
Liquid is relatively uncommon on the surfaces of things in space. It's the middle ordinary state of matter, in between solids and gasses. As such, it's inherently unstable; for extreme values of pressure or temperature (low or high), you get a solid or a gas.
It takes a peculiar set of circumstances for a liquid to persist long-term on the surface of a planet; just to start with, you need an atmosphere of high enough pressure to get above the triple point. Below that pressure, the solid phase transitions directly to the gas phase and back. This is the case for carbon dioxide at 1 atm, hence the behavior of dry ice.
So far the only place we know of with relatively stable bodies of liquid on its surface is Earth. Thus, the discovery of a second body with stable liquid on its surface would allow us to cross-check a lot of theories of planetary dynamics which currently rely on a single data point.
I would think that advertisers would welcome ad-blocking technology. Smart people rarely buy something because an annoying flash ad strobed and jiggled at them, so server hits to send such ads to smart people are largely wasted expense for the advertiser.
However, only reasonably smart people can understand how to obtain and train an ad blocker. Voila, problem solved; your ad-server hits magically skew toward stupid people, who are more likely to buy your products. Each hit on your server generates more revenue than if ad-blocking technology did not exist.
One would hope that the Planetary Society had some sort of insurance or contract covering loss of the payload, in which case they'll just take the insurance/refund money and fund the replacement mission with it.
As a member of the PS myself, I'll be rather pissed off if they didn't take such precautions.
Google's web index and desktop search facility is a database. I don't know about point 1, but Google definitely blows any relational database out of the water on point 2 to 4.
Google's performance and value are both amazing. But it's easy to drive yourself nuts (if you're an enterprise software architect, which I am) trying to get that kind of performance out of other types of application. You see, Google has two major advantages over nearly all other large data-backed applications:
1. There is no "right" answer
Google keeps their ranking and indexing schemes proprietary, so nobody can say what "should" come back from a given search. Indeed, execute the same query at the same time from different machines, or the same machine at different times, and you sometimes get wildly varying results. SEO folks call this the "Google Dance".
2. Writes are asynchronous with reads
As near as anyone can tell, the Google index is rebuilt by their crawler over the span of a few weeks, and then the whole new index is exported to production machines over the span of a few days. Only the crawler writes data to the index, and the index as it's being built is not read by end-user clients; the production index is *only* read.
These advantages let Google use a distributed, loosely coupled, inconsistent server farm made of cheap boxes that needn't be in sync with one another. It doesn't matter if queries to two of them give different answers, after all.
Contrast this with (e.g.) an online bookstore; once you order a book, every node in every part of the system needs to know about that order in order to keep everything consistent (stock level monitoring, end-user purchase tracking, and so forth). This is a much, much harder problem to solve.
So again, not to take anything away from Google's tech (which I more or less worship), but it's not a fair point of comparison for most large enterprise apps.
Haven't you ever heard of signal redundancy? Clearly the/. editors consider the web (or readers' brains) to be a lossy transmission medium, and are taking appropropriate steps to insure successful transmission.
Humans despise rape because we are built to live in stable small communities of mostly related people mostly living in monogamous relationships. This arrangement maximizes our odds of having our own genes or the very similar genes of close relatives survive. Rape is the forcible 'stealing' of resources in this system, and thus we're coded to loathe it in order to make us defend 'our' women against it with great energy.
Actually, through proper practice of yoga one can attain to perception of the higher sheaths, until in the end samadhi destroys the entire illusion of separate existence, or indeed of existence itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Never heard of that one, but I do know that when the site of a medieval silversmith's workshop is inspected by archaologists, a pile of platinum pebbles is often found in the corner. Platinum and silver look the same, have similar densities, and often run in the same ore bodies, but the temperatures attainable in a medieval furnace are insufficient to melt platinum. So, apparently the smiths poured off the molten silver, then (no doubt with a snort of disgust) tossed the useless platinum into the corner.
Should I be more embarrassed that I get my news from a source that calls tetrahedra "d4s", or that I immediately knew what that meant?
Alas, I don't recall; it might have been in one of the essays in Report on Planet Three. I read it decades ago, so I doubt I still have the book, but I'll check my library and post another reply here if it turns up -- and if some other kind soul hasn't beaten me to it.
As usual, Arthur C. Clarke thought of this long ago. I still remember his excerpt from the instructions: "Okay, kiddies, now that you've mixed your uranium hexafluoride..."
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "And don't you come back", '... no more' x 4, ".\n";
Not really. If anything, I think he goes out of his way to be optimistic about our chances; see the last chapter in particular. I believe this was a very calculated move on his part, as to portray our odds the way they really look would create hopelessness and paralysis. If we *do* have a chance, then it's essential for us to feel like we have one, and thus act to make it happen.
As William Gibson remarked (quoting from memory), "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed."
I don't know; Jared Diamond seems to be selling a lot of copies of Collapse.
There's a great silent theater on Fairfax in L.A. (I think it's still around, though I haven't paid attention for a few years) that shows old films, complete with live piano accompaniment.
It's still there, but struggling. The accompaniments aren't always just piano; a couple of years ago I saw a live performance there of an original rock orchestration for Metropolis that was friggin' amazing.
The venue is also notable for being the site (about 10 years ago, IIRC) of a murder worthy of a second-rate detective movie; an associate of the original owner killed him in order to get control of his film collection -- in the box office during a showing!
Or rather, normally in the solid phase. "Water" is specific to H2O; "ice" is used generically for the solid phase of a variety of chemicals we (Terrans) are used to encountering as liquids or gasses.
I once read a science fiction story featuring beings from a Titan-like planet discussing Earth. One of them marveled that Earth was so unimaginably hot that its surface was mostly covered with deep pools of molten water. I thought that was beautifully phrased.
Space weapons are weapons specifically designed to attack objects in space or objects on the ground.
Well, let's see, does that mean my BB gun is a space weapon? It's pretty good at attacking objects on the ground. Yee haw, I'm a space-based weapon superpower!
Pretty much true. Look at some of the analyses done on the scientific value of the space station. Other than as a place to examine the effects of long-term living in space, it's pretty much useless. And even at that task it's suboptimal.
Their most difficult task before leaving the station was the maneuvering of a huge cargo container filled with 2 1/2 years worth of trash into the shuttle's payload bay.
When, at the age of seven, I sat enthralled by the Apollo XI landing in 1969, I would never have believed that our most sophisticated space vehicle in 2005 would be an aging garbage truck traveling a couple of hundred miles from Earth to visit a space station with no purpose.
I can't even think about this for too long; I start shaking with the force of my anger and disappointment.
We recently ported an app back end from EJB 2.1 to Spring plus Hibernate. I am incredibly impressed by the latter; this is the simple, efficient, well-architected ORM system Java has lacked for years. I'm still absorbing the beauty and power of inversion of control. And we haven't even begun to (directly) make use of Spring's AOP features.
I was beginning to have doubts about Java as a biz-dev language/platform. But Spring and Hibernate have made me a happy Java advocate again.
You should give props to the brilliant Weird Al Yankovic, who wrote and performed this masterpiece. (Which is now going through my head on permanent loop, thanks a ton.)
Liquid is relatively uncommon on the surfaces of things in space. It's the middle ordinary state of matter, in between solids and gasses. As such, it's inherently unstable; for extreme values of pressure or temperature (low or high), you get a solid or a gas.
It takes a peculiar set of circumstances for a liquid to persist long-term on the surface of a planet; just to start with, you need an atmosphere of high enough pressure to get above the triple point. Below that pressure, the solid phase transitions directly to the gas phase and back. This is the case for carbon dioxide at 1 atm, hence the behavior of dry ice.
So far the only place we know of with relatively stable bodies of liquid on its surface is Earth. Thus, the discovery of a second body with stable liquid on its surface would allow us to cross-check a lot of theories of planetary dynamics which currently rely on a single data point.
I believe it was Marvin Minsky who, when asked whether computers would ever be as smart as humans, replied:
"Yes. Briefly."
That one always gives me the shivers.
I would think that advertisers would welcome ad-blocking technology. Smart people rarely buy something because an annoying flash ad strobed and jiggled at them, so server hits to send such ads to smart people are largely wasted expense for the advertiser.
However, only reasonably smart people can understand how to obtain and train an ad blocker. Voila, problem solved; your ad-server hits magically skew toward stupid people, who are more likely to buy your products. Each hit on your server generates more revenue than if ad-blocking technology did not exist.
Ain't the invisible hand cool?
One would hope that the Planetary Society had some sort of insurance or contract covering loss of the payload, in which case they'll just take the insurance/refund money and fund the replacement mission with it.
As a member of the PS myself, I'll be rather pissed off if they didn't take such precautions.
Google's web index and desktop search facility is a database. I don't know about point 1, but Google definitely blows any relational database out of the water on point 2 to 4.
Google's performance and value are both amazing. But it's easy to drive yourself nuts (if you're an enterprise software architect, which I am) trying to get that kind of performance out of other types of application. You see, Google has two major advantages over nearly all other large data-backed applications:
1. There is no "right" answer
Google keeps their ranking and indexing schemes proprietary, so nobody can say what "should" come back from a given search. Indeed, execute the same query at the same time from different machines, or the same machine at different times, and you sometimes get wildly varying results. SEO folks call this the "Google Dance".
2. Writes are asynchronous with reads
As near as anyone can tell, the Google index is rebuilt by their crawler over the span of a few weeks, and then the whole new index is exported to production machines over the span of a few days. Only the crawler writes data to the index, and the index as it's being built is not read by end-user clients; the production index is *only* read.
These advantages let Google use a distributed, loosely coupled, inconsistent server farm made of cheap boxes that needn't be in sync with one another. It doesn't matter if queries to two of them give different answers, after all.
Contrast this with (e.g.) an online bookstore; once you order a book, every node in every part of the system needs to know about that order in order to keep everything consistent (stock level monitoring, end-user purchase tracking, and so forth). This is a much, much harder problem to solve.
So again, not to take anything away from Google's tech (which I more or less worship), but it's not a fair point of comparison for most large enterprise apps.
2x7 for the two lost Shuttle crews, 3 for the Apollo 1 ground fire, and that's 17 -- who am I missing?
Haven't you ever heard of signal redundancy? Clearly the /. editors consider the web (or readers' brains) to be a lossy transmission medium, and are taking appropropriate steps to insure successful transmission.
Humans despise rape because we are built to live in stable small communities of mostly related people mostly living in monogamous relationships. This arrangement maximizes our odds of having our own genes or the very similar genes of close relatives survive. Rape is the forcible 'stealing' of resources in this system, and thus we're coded to loathe it in order to make us defend 'our' women against it with great energy.
Actually, through proper practice of yoga one can attain to perception of the higher sheaths, until in the end samadhi destroys the entire illusion of separate existence, or indeed of existence itself.
:)
But I'm not that far along the path yet.